Competitive games are a popular form of recreation. From the Olympics to the Super Bowl to backyard volleyball games, competitive games consume a large portion of our free time. Whether watching or participating, the allure is undeniable. In addition to the competitive sports, intellectual competitions such as chess or bridge tournaments are also popular.
These competitions remain porular because whether a participant or spectator, one is involved. They require people to meet at a central location and specific time, providing a sense of community and camaraderie, as well as a place to socialize. A typical chess tournament, for example, might have fifty players meeting at a central playing site.
Such tournaments and competitions suffer from several drawbacks, however, as participants may have to travel considerable distance to get to the playing site and may require expensive overnight accommodations when the tournament lasts more than one day. The start times for most tournaments must also be fixed in advance. The chess players, for example, might meet at 9:00 AM for the start of the first round. This forces all participants to adhere to the same schedule, an increasingly difficult proposition in today's busy world. Furthermore, facilities used to host the tournament, such as hotel meeting rooms, banquet halls, and auditoriums, represent a significant expense to the tournament organizers.
To ensure that the rules of the tournament are upheld, most competitions require proctors, arbiters, referees, and the like. Retaining such people can add significant costs to competitions. There may also be a limited supply of individuals qualified to oversee the tournament. For example, if there are only two sanctioned backgammon tournament directors in a city, the backgammon tournament might have to be canceled if both are sick on the day of the competition. Such cancellations can be costly for those participants planning on traveling to the tournament, who would have to cancel flights and hotel registrations.
Tournaments geared to a narrower subset of tournament players (niche tournaments) are often economically unfeasible because of the high costs associated with obtaining playing facilities. While it may be possible to hold a martial arts tournament in a city, it may be hard to hold a tournament for a specific subset of the martial arts such as Aikido. The few players that would participate would not justify the cost of the facilities. Electronic tournaments allow participants to "meet" in cyberspace, competing at a virtual location accessible to any player at any time. Because no travel is required, many of the disadvantages of physical tournaments are eliminated, while maintaining the sense of camaraderie.
Online games and contests have existed almost since online networks were created. The first online services available to a user with a personal computer and a modem were bulletin board systems or BBSs. They started appearing in the early 1980s and exploded in popularity along with the growth of the personal computer. The most primitive of these systems allowed users to share files and exchange email. The ability to conduct electronic games was quickly added as enthusiasts joined the systems. BBSs were usually operated by computer enthusiasts more as a hobby than as a commercial enterprise. In the late 1980s, corporations began creating online services that could handle thousands of users simultaneously. Online services such as Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online brought a new level of professionalism and sophistication to the industry. Inelegant text-based user interfaces were replaced with graphical front ends that no longer required users to memorize arcane commands or codes. Game play became more popular as the software became increasingly userfriendly.
One of the companies providing games in this new environment is NTN Communications. They offer a trivia game on America Online in which players compete by answering a series of questions. There are five possible answers, with 1000 points being awarded for a correct answer. The player is given a limited amount of time to come up with an answer, and fewer points are awarded for a correct answer as time passes. At the end of the contest, the top scores are displayed to all competitors. The game has a major drawback, however, in that there are no prizes awarded to players. The competitive drive is diminished when there is no prize for winning. It's like playing a game of poker without using money.
To increase player interest, several companies have begun to offer online contests with cash prizes. Yoyodyne Entertainment provides an email-based trivia game that is available through the Internet and several online services. Players receive questions via email and must submit their answers before a deadline, which is usually a day or two later. Points are awarded for each correct answer and deducted for each incorrect answer. The winner is the person with the highest score at the end of the contest.
Interactive Imaginations also developed online contests for prizes. They created the Riddler site on the World Wide Web. Users are offered a selection of games, including trivia and puzzle games. Like the Yoyodyne site, prize amounts are necessarily limited because there are no entry fees.
One company has combined both entry fees and prizes to generate new potential customers. Bert & Associates created an options trading game in which contestants pay an entry fee in order to become eligible for the prizes. The game was merely a peripheral element of their business, however, meant only to attract customers to their brokerage business. Another limitation of the games run by Yoyodyne and Interactive Imaginations is that there is no continuity among the games. The results of one game have no impact on the results of another game. Each game is an independent event; they are not linked together into a more continuous game experience. After registering for one game, the process must be repeated for future games. A player who has become an expert in a trivia game is able to enter the same trivia games again and again, monopolizing the top prizes. Game organizers are unable to prevent this since there are no effective controls on who can register for a game. Games geared exclusively to experts are impossible as there is no effective way to screen the qualifications of participants.
Rating systems, popular in chess and backgammon games, are impossible to implement without a way to track a player's progress over a number of games. Handicap systems popular in golf games are similarly restricted in that player results must be tracked over a series of games, not just one game.
Online games also lack effective reservation systems; players simply log on at the appropriate time and begin play. If game organizers want to restrict the number of players, they are forced to establish an arbitrary limit on the number of entrants. If such a limit is enforced, however, players will have no way to know in advance whether or not they will be able to register at the time the tournament starts.
Existing electronic games also lack the implementation of levels, a progression of increasing difficulty throughout the competition. What is missing is the excitement of elimination found in virtually every other competitive environment. To date, all online contests have involved a single game session. In a trivia game, players answer a series of questions and receive a score based on the number of correct responses. The winner is the player with the highest score. In a puzzle contest, the first correct solution wins.
The world of professional sports demonstrates the desirability of levels. Professional basketball, for example, consists of a regular season followed by post-season play. A certain number of teams qualify for post-season play based on their regular season records. These teams then play each other in an elimination format until two teams remain to play in the final series that determines the winner. Advancement to the next round of post-season play depends on a team's performance in the previous round. There is no doubt that the tournament structure adds a great deal of excitement not only to each of the post-season games, but also to the games at the end of the regular season as well.
Imagine a basketball season in which the champion was determined by the regular season record alone. The last games of the season would be irrelevant if the current leader were many games ahead of the nearest team. Spectator and player interest would drop dramatically. Teams whose scores would place them in the middle of the pack could be out of contention with dozens of games remaining. There would be little incentive to press for a win in the remaining games. Key competitive match-ups might also be missed. Two teams with top records that were never scheduled to play each other would vie for the title without ever having played. Player curiosity as to which team was really the best would not be satisfied without a head to head competition.
All professional sports use an elimination process to make the game more exciting for participants as well as spectators. Professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey all have regular seasons followed by post-season play in which teams are eliminated from contention. Instead of having a regular season, professional tennis offers a series of games in which the field narrows through a process of elimination until ultimately one competitor remains and is declared the winner. Professional golf tournaments have a cut in which the field is dramatically cut back before the final round of competition begins. It should be apparent from the foregoing that there is a need for an electronic gaming system in which players from different locations can participate in and win awards. The system should not just support stand-alone games, but should also support the coordination of multiple games in which information from one game impacts future games.